Clinton's missing agenda

...Like President Clinton, they have governed from the center: culturally conservative, indifferent to the poor, but more than willing to increase spending on public programs that serve the middle class...

...However, they have yet to formulate an economic agenda that will make a lasting difference in the lives of millions of Americans —and a lasting difference in the fortunes of the Democratic Party...

...A six-vote deficit in the House is probably easier to handle than a six-vote majority: in either case, the Democrats probably couldn't pass significant legislation, and this way, they won't be blamed for it...

...Tax cuts still rank high on any Republican congressional agenda, but they didn't rank all that high in any of the exit polls, which showed the electorate far more concerned about education and about equally concerned about Social Security and the economy...

...For their part, some core Democratic groups, labor in particular, have intensified their opposition to privatization, arguing, quite rightly, that the current program is a hugely effective antipoverty program and a stabilizer for the entire economy...

...Bill Clinton has already conceded the right's argument that the current system is imperiled, though the projections of budget surpluses far into the future have rendered this threat more a matter of faith than of hard numbers...

...It is the GOP's great good fortune that it is impossible to govern a state as its congressonal wing claims it would govern the nation...

...With the number of House Democrats slightly augmented as a result of November's vote, Clinton, Gephardt, Daschle and Co...

...This way, the question of What To Do With Bill Clinton remains the GOP's headache, not theirs...

...In its maximum version, the proposal for a state living wage, however, would cover everyone—supplanting the minimum wage and creating an option for a vast increase in health coverage...

...The broader question confronting the Democrats is whether their carefully crafted minimalism in all things economic isn't actually hurting them at the polls...

...Christopher Cox, the five-term Republican representative from Orange County who waged a two-day campaign for the post, was the darling of the party's economic right...

...Al Gore's reluctance to offend such groups approaches the infinite...

...He has nodded attentively at presentations calling for the partial privatization of the system, though these presentations were delivered at forums that antedated the stock market's wild summer gyrations...

...The economic and public-health case for such a proposal is quite compelling: California has become the American capital of lowwage service-sector jobs, which also means it has a disproportionate number of uninsured residents as well (the figure is about 7 percent higher than the national average), posing a constant threat to the solvency of the state's public-health systems...

...Support for broadly targeted government programs that enhance economic opportunity and security—programs that improve teacher training, raise teachers' salaries, and hike the minimum wage—remains high...

...Louis Brandeis's notion of the states as "laboratories of democracy," where progressive policies could be road-tested for eventual national adoption, has never seemed more improbable...

...During Clinton's first term, according to the indices compiled by The Almanac of American Politics, Livingston aligned himself with the liberal position on 22 percent of key votes, while Cox voted that way just 3 percent of the time...

...OW, IN the wake of November's electoral repudiation, Republicans are — scurrying madly away from the politics of jihad that they've practiced for the past four years...

...Beyond California, though, the Democrats remain a D.C...

...Legislation increasing federal funding for school construction, federal regulation of tobacco sales to minors, and patients' ability to sue their HMO will be reintroduced, and the new Republican leadership may feel compelled to strike a compromise on some of these proposals...

...Polling on the living wage, as well as on raising the minimum wage and extending health coverage, suggests that a living wage would be widely popular (and most especially among the growing number of Latino voters), but it would obviously engender intense business opposition...

...BILL CLINTON has flouted core Democratic constituencies before, of course, most notably by endorsing the Republicans' decimation of welfare, but his indebtedness to those groups has increased during the course of the impeachment wars...

...As I write, zealots are pressuring the party to continue the impeachment process, though it has clearly become a Frankenstein's monster that threatens to destroy the pols who gave it life...

...Public opinion, having been barraged for years with propaganda from privatization advocates while the existing system's champions have been utterly mute, remains fluid...

...This is not 1994...

...Today, they are the party that wants to facilitate more HMO lawsuits...

...Support for Democratic House candidates among voters from households with annual incomes over $75,000 has risen from 44 percent in 1992, and 38 percent in 1994, to 47 percent in the November elections...

...On Capitol Hill, life in the minority may have its consolations...

...For November's election leaves the Democrats in control of precious few statehouses —seventeen, to be exact...

...Just as the sixties left in its Weatherman incarnation announced that its mission was to wage an insurrection against established society, the nineties right moved to smash the state by closing down the federal government, made private morality a public matter by the prominence it gave to the abortion issue and the Lewinsky affair, and otherwise made clear that it too was spoiling for a civil war that would purify America...

...This is a proposal, adopted by Los Angeles and a number of other cities across the country, that mandates that city contractors pay their employees—usually, janitorial or fast-food workers on city property —either $7.50 an hour with medical benefits or $8.50 an hour without...

...The Republicans are more likely to hang tough, at least in the Senate, on the one Democratic proposal that would actually shake up the established order: campaign-finance reform...

...The one notably progressive idea under discussion during the current interregnum is for a statewide "living wage...

...Problem is, their respectable, mainstreamright agenda looks shaky as well...

...Weekly...

...Support for Democratic House candidates among voters from households with annual incomes under $30,000, however, has declined since 1992—from 69 percent to 59 percent among voters whose household-income level is beneath $15,000, from 57 percent to 55 percent among voters whose household income is between $15,000 and $30,000...

...Not only did it lose its national leader when Newt Gingrich was shoved from the speakership, but it then lost the brief and intense battle to elect his successor...

...DISSENT / Winter 1999 5 And yet, the right is not going gently into the moderate night...

...party through and through...

...They will control the governorships of all five Pacific Rim states, where state GOP voters tend to nominate candidates who are far to the right of what these culturally moderate-to-liberal (-to-libertarian) electorates are willing to support...

...The challenge for Social Security advocates is not merely to assure the public that Social Security is not merely such a program, but one whose solvency can be assured without having to dismantle it altogether...

...In particular, though Republican governors have been at the forefront of dismantling welfare, they have largely ignored the anti-statist zeal, the preference for privateschool vouchers and the like, that characterizes their congressional comrades' views on education...

...GOP presidential hopeful Steve Forbes, apparently reasoning that you can never be too right-wing for the GOP primary electorate, complains that the reason for the Republicans' November reversals was their reticence in going after Clinton...

...Both the latesixties left and the mid-nineties right began by espousing broadly popular causes—respectively, opposition to the Vietnam War and opposition to welfare—but a sense of maddened rectitude soon pushed them to the fringes of the political spectrum...

...California, America's megastate, is the one exception to the Republican rule...

...On both the Weather left and the Gingrich right, intensity substituted for breadth of support, and each group's apostles came to dwell within a hall of mirrors that led them to believe their strength was far beyond what the numbers actually were...

...A former Reagan White House lawyer who advised supply-side fanatic Arthur Laffer during his quixotic 1986 Senate campaign, Cox was endorsed by the Wall Street Journal for the speakership—on the very day that Louisiana's Bob Livingston, the wheeling-dealing chair of the House Appropriations Committee, was persauding his colleagues to make him speaker...

...In 1998, the Democrats can justly boast that they have reclaimed the center on cultural questions...

...Their president, quite commendably, speaks of creating a more stable, mixed economy on the global level, even as his Treasury Department shoots down all proposals that could produce such reforms...

...The GOP's big winners this month weren't the antistatist zealots of Congress, but Republican governors who had identified themselves with improving the public schools in their states...

...In fact, by ending welfare, Republicans may have inadvertently helped to rehabilitate government spending (it no longer subsidizes loafers, you see...

...When historians look back on the period of the Gingrich speakership, I suspect they will view these years as a period of self-destructive excess on the right, much as they view the late sixties and early seventies as a time of selfinduced implosion on the left...

...With the Republicans' congressional majorities so narrow and their agendas so skimpy, party leadership is likely to shift toward the governors...

...As FOR their Democratic counterparts— well, they have no Democratic counterparts...

...If the Democrats are to regain their status as America's majority party, they will have to commit themselves more firmly to the causes of economic opportunity and security—causes that now require some changes in the rules of the global marketplace (more accurately, the creation of some rules for the global marketplace...

...The political case for such a proposal is shakier, but not to the point that it's beyond consideration...

...Come January, it will not only have a centrist Democratic governor, but a Democatic legislature with the most left leadership Sacramento has ever seen...

...But once past California, where the Democrats won by landslide proportions this year, there's not a single major state that will be under Democratic control...

...HAROLD MEYERSON is executive editor of L.A...

...will 6 DISSENT / Winter 1999 doubtless resurrect their near-misses of the past session...

...As Ruy Teixeira of the Economic Policy Institute has pointed out, the Democrats have improved their vote during the four elections of the Clinton years chiefly among the most affluent electors...

...Over the past four years, they have, in fact, been increasing state education budgets —and schoolroom accountability—as though they were a bunch of Democrats...

...DISSENT / Winter 1999 7...

...the public is manifestly not in an anti-statist mood...

...In 1992, the Democrats stood for universal health insurance...

...The biggest question looming over Washington is the "reform" of Social Security, and the best-kept secret in this mystery is the position of the president...

...It was the congressional right that suffered the gravest defeats...

...Livingston is a traditional southern conservative—but he's not a movement conservative like Cox...

...These are positions that are not simply out of step with the American public, but on another planet altogether...

...As moderate GOP governors swept to victory all across America, hard-right GOP governors and gubernatorial candidates—Alabama's Fob James, South Carolina's David Beasley, California's Dan Lungren—were going down in states long regarded as Republican strongholds...